Landscapes are a brilliant way to encapsulate and frame nature. A horizon vanishing down to a point signals something that used to be called Nature: the more immaterial, less quantifiable. Landscapes demarcate vanishing points and horizons, creating a stable, uniform background, creating a stability of place and identity. In “The Philosophy of Landscape”, Georg Simmel thinks about this way: “As far as landscape is concerned, however, a boundary, a way of being encompassed by a momentary or permanent field of vision, is quite essential…. Conceived of as a ‘landscape’, it demands a status for itself, which may be optical, aesthetic or mood-centered”.
This gets weird in Guillermo Carnero's poem:
No sé hasta dónde se extiende mi cuerpo.
No sé hasta cuándo cayera el más lejano cuerpo de muralla;
no sé
Hasta qué altura yacen los sillares entre las serpientes o
lenguas de sol,
Entre la alucinada tierra, bajo ese cráter polvoriento y callado,
los cuarteados terrones de ese de arcilla.
Tampoco sé hasta dónde se extiende la tierra; quizás
un horizonte redondo.
It might be a nice round horizon, but it seems unlikely to be that even...
Instead of thinking about landscape as a stable horizon, this blog takes its cue from Guillermo Carnero’s poem, cited above, to suggest that landscapes become destabilizing when they encounter the nonlocal or the distant. “Entre la alucinada tierra, bajo ese cráter polvoriento y callado, / los cuarteados terrones de ese de arcilla,” suggests an unknown lurking at the edges of an environment. Little pieces of land begin to perform in their own right. The extension towards the borderlines of bodies and regions touches an outside, something that we do not want to admit into the interior of place.
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